Just a bit of air expelled through two tautened lips. He could say more—wants to, I’m sure—but the presence of two grandchildren in the room prevents any further commentary. That’s a shame. You’ve never fully appreciated the news until you’ve watched it alongside my father’s commentary.

The pictures on the television are the sort that’s been played and replayed for a while now—tents and marches and protest, people with microphones shouting down with this and up with that. It’s all a little too much, especially with the grandkids sitting there (right now they’re working on the Play-Doh, but I know they’re watching the screen).

I ask him if I should turn the channel. He works the chaw of Beechnut in his cheek and shakes his head. “Wanna see who won the race,” he says.

So I watch the screen and I watch him and I watch my kids and I know that I am in the middle. I’m the bridge between him and them. I’m the link to hold the chain. And I realize that it really wasn’t that long ago—if you can call twenty years long—that I was sure my father had no idea what the world was all about.

I think your teenage years are proof that the more you think you know, the dumber you really are.

My kids—his grandkids—are watching now. They’re showing a policeman pepper-spraying a young man with long hair. Dad watches, too. I’m wondering what they’re all thinking and if what they’re thinking is pretty much the same. I think so. I think when you get right down to it, crazy looks crazy no matter what age you are.

In the end (and as it should), Play-Doh wins out over the news. The kids don’t care what’s happening a thousand miles away in some city. Their world’s here in the mountains, where things are quiet and life makes more sense. But Dad, he keeps watching and working that chaw, turning it around in his mouth, thinking.

He’s been in a good mood lately. Not that he isn’t usually, just more so now. After thirty-five years of work, he has only three days left. Appropriately enough, Thanksgiving Day will be his first day of retirement.

It hasn’t been easy, those thirty-five years. The ones before it weren’t easy, either. He took the job for the same reason that many husbands and fathers do—because it paid well and offered a better life for his family. Certainly it wasn’t because he enjoyed it—who would enjoy driving a rig up and down the Southeast, being separated from family, living off greasy truck stop food?

But he did it anyway. Day in, day out, through blizzards and tornados and hurricanes and floods. As a child I would pray every night for his safety. I still do. And God’s watched over him—Dad’s driven over three million miles without an accident. Back in ’98, he had a stroke just outside of Fredericksburg. The doctors couldn’t understand how he managed to drive his rig into the terminal and back it up to the dock before falling out of the cab. I could. It was his job, simple as that.

His formal education ended at the eighth grade. He grew up in poverty and hustled pool, but the Army straightened him out. And when it came time to marry and start a family, he swore he would give his kids a better life than he had.

That’s exactly what he did.

On the television, one of the protesters says he’s there because he wants a free education. He’s owed that, he says, though he doesn’t really say why. Dad doesn’t say what he thinks of that, and I’m thankful. If he did, I’d have to write it with a lot of ampersands and exclamation points.

Because Dad and his eight-grade education knows more about the world than the people on television and their college degrees. Because he knows that no one is owed anything, and the sooner you realize that the better off you’ll be. Because you have to work and scrape and save and drive the truck.

He won’t say that only those who have stood up to work should have the right to sit down and protest. The grandkids are in the room.

So I’ll just say it for him. Because after thirty-five years, I think he’s earned it.

My uncle picked this tomahawk up last summer and gave it to my daughter, a budding Indiana Jones. And when I said he picked it up, I mean it literally. He found it in a cornfield between the South River and the Hershey plant, about six miles from my home.

People a lot smarter than me say there were never any permanent native settlements in this area. The Shenandoah Valley was instead a kind of ancient superhighway that various tribes traveled through on their way from one place to another. Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Catawba, and Delaware Indians visited this area at various times, as well as my ancestors, the Cherokee.

The problem was that in a fairly limited amount of space, one tribe was bound to run into another. The results weren’t pretty. For thousands of years, much of our valley was one big battlefield.

Evidence of these tribal wars can be found every spring when the farmers start plowing their fields. There are arrowheads by the millions, flint scalping blades by the thousands, and sometimes, the head of a tomahawk.

I’ve spent many a lost moment with this tomahawk in my hands, asking the unanswerable.

Who made this? When? How did it end up in a cornfield?

Why, I suppose, is a question that that doesn’t need asking. To the Native American male, a tomahawk was his most prized possession. Much like the samurai and his sword, the tomahawk held an almost mythical position. It was the weapon of a warrior. A instrument of death.

But maybe asking why it was made does matter. Maybe that’s the question that matters most.

I never go hiking without a tomahawk. From building a shelter to securing food and water, it can perform tasks that a knife simply cannot. One of the wisest pieces of advice about going into the woods came from my father: “You can take a knife into the mountains and live like a prince. But you can take a tomahawk into the mountains and live like a king.”

My point?

Though the tomahawk can certainly be used as a weapon, it is first and foremost a tool. It’s a thing. And like all things, it can be used for good or for bad. It can improve life or destroy it. It all depends on the user.

Maybe it’s no surprise that the ancient people who once roamed these parts chose to use their tools to destroy life. After all, they were ignorant savages. Right?

But consider what you’re using to read this post. The Internet is quite possibly greatest invention of the last century. It allows people from almost any country to connect with people they would otherwise never meet. To be exposed to other cultures and ideas. To connect. It is a treasure of information and knowledge. Don’t know something? Google it. You’ll have your answer in seconds.

But this wondrous invention that can improve the lives of millions of people has destroyed just as many. There are an estimated twenty million websites devoted exclusively to pornography. You can google how to make a bomb just as easily as how to make a birthday cake. And for every highcallingblogs.com there is a jihadist calling for death and destruction.

Maybe we’re all ignorant savages.

Not much has changed since that unknown person dropped his tomahawk and my uncle picked it up. We’re still taking what was made for good and using it for bad. And I suppose we always will. We may be smarter and more capable than our ancestors, and our children may grow to be smarter and more capable than us, but we all carry around the same fallen nature.

That’s why I get a little leery when I start hearing about how things will get better when this person’s in charge or that country gets fixed or that peace agreement gets signed. I know better.

And I know this, too: each day we are faced with this one choice: what will I do? What will I do with what God has given me? Will I use my mind to think about how I can help others, or will I use it to think about how I can help myself? Will I open my heart and risk loving even more, or will I close it because I’m too frightened of hurt? And will I use my faith as a salve to pour on open wounds, or as a weapon to fester those wounds more?

This ancient tomahawk sitting beside me was likely used to both preserve the life of its owner and take the life of his enemy. Us? We’re not a matter of both, I think. I think we’re either/or. Either serving God or serving ourselves. Either helping others or not.

Either bringing the world a little closer to heaven or a little closer to hell.

This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Resolution, hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To read more stories on this topic, please visit him at PeterPollock.com

I can’t remember the name of the tribe, which is mildly ironic given the nature of their story. And it’s quite a story.It amazes me that regardless of how smart we are and how much we can do, we still know so little about the world.

Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Species thought long extinct still turn up every once in a while. And just last year, scientists stumbled upon a valley in New Guinea that had gone untouched by man since the dawn of time. There were plants and insects never seen before. And the animals never bothered hiding or running from the explorers. They didn’t have the experience to tell them humans were a potential threat.

But of course it’s not just plants and animals and hidden valleys that are being discovered. People are, too. And that can lead to all sorts of things.

Take, for instance, the tribe I mentioned above.

They were discovered in 1943 in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon jungle. Contact was carefully arranged. Easy at first, nothing too rash. That seems to be rule number one in those situations–don’t overwhelm the tribe.

It didn’t work. Here’s why.

The difference between these particular people and the others that pop up every few years was that their uniqueness was foundational to their belief system. They’d been so cut off from civilization for so long that they were convinced they were the only humans in the world. No one outside of their small tribe existed. And they liked that idea.

Finding out that not only were there other people in the world, there were billions of them, was too much. The trauma of learning they were not unique was so debilitating that the entire tribe almost died out. Even now, sixty-nine years later, only a few remain.

Sad, isn’t it?

I’ll admit the temptation was there for me to think of that tribe as backward and primitive for thinking such a thing. But then I realized they weren’t. When you get right down to it, their beliefs and the truth they couldn’t carry made them more human than a lot of people I know.

Because we all want to be unique.

We all want to think we’re special, needed by God and man for some purpose that will outlast us. We want to be known and remembered. We all know on a certain level that we will pass this way but once, and so we want whatever time we have in this world to matter.

That’s not a primitive notion. That’s a universal one.

I think at some point we’re all like members of that tribe. We have notions of greatness, of doing at most the impossible and at least the improbable. Of blazing a new trail for others to follow. It’s a fire that burns and propels our lives forward.

I will make a difference, we say. People will know I was here.

But then we have a moment like that tribe had, when we realize there are a lot of other people out there who are more talented and just as hungry. People who seem to catch the breaks we don’t and have the success that eludes us. And that notion that we were different and special fades as we’re pulled into the crowd of humanity and told to take our rightful place among the masses.

It’s tough, hanging on to a dream. Tough having to talk yourself into holding the course rather than turning back. Tough having to summon faith amidst all the doubt.

But I know this:

That tribe was right.

We are all unique.

We are all here for a purpose, and it’s a holy purpose. One that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else and depends upon us.

We are more than flesh and blood. More than DNA and RNA and genes and neurons. And this world is more than air and water and earth. Whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, our hearts are a battleground between the two opposing forces of light and dark.